Your temporary residences: No one quite knows where you live, but the Mushroom Kingdom is your [goomba?] stomping ground. Are these hills really your home? The ones blanketed in dancing trees hiding strange suits that give you strange abilities? What of the desert? Where spiky, dangerous beasts gingerly saunter to your location and follow your every move, all the while with devious, unassuming smiles on their faces. What about the snowy slopes? The kind you slip and slide on, fearing an icy, watery bath at any given misstep. Water worlds that have squid-like monstrosities swarming you at every stroke… It's a colourful place with portals leading everywhere, each destination even more beautiful and treacherous than the last.

It's a nice place to want to frolic in, isn't it? Or maybe it's not that great, after all. You see, you have a brother - a heartless brother stealing all your glory… and now it's time to expend that wrath that has stewed these 30 years, living in his shadow.

I mean really, would it pain your brother to let you know that the princess was not actually in the castle, before you went in there and did it all over again?

Did you have to jump through hoops, dodge fireballs and revisit the reanimated corpses of all those turtles you sent flying into pits and roasted with flower power fireballs? Why don't those dry bones just stay down, anyway?

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Sure it's fun to get the occasional star power - to be coated in all those rainbow colours like yet another bad high school rendition of the Technicolor Dreamcoat, dashing through enemies who never saw it coming.

And yes, it's fun to visit a toad house, and even more fun still to treat the resident Toad's head like a trampoline. They don't seem to mind, so why not?

But those joys are few and far in-between. Not when there are worse things to worry about such as the haunted spirits of Boo chasing you down halls full of Whomp blocks while they laugh that blood curdling laugh. Playing peek a boo? Oh, I see what you did there but being chased around by ghosts is a nightmare all its own.

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And for 30 years, Luigi endured this suffering, the sad life of the second fiddle. He watched his older brother fumble countless rescue missions as the local tyrant went on annual kidnapping rampages. Indeed, Jack Bauer Mario is not.

As if to add insult to injury, Luigi got to show his singular jumping prowess only as an afterthought. Only after Mario had completed his romp through the Worlds. Only if someone really wanted to trudge through dangers again. Only if someone remembered he was a playable character after all. Only if someone actually cared.

And Luigi has had it.

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No more Mr. Nice Moustachio in Mario Kart 8. No more timid, gentle, seemingly-less clever Luigi. The green-hatted brother donned his finest pair of overalls—okay, the very same design he utilized for almost all of the 365 days in the year, but don't you dare imply that they are palette-swapped! He grabbed his favourite hat with the big green L emblem stitched into the front; trimmed his moustache and put on his game face.

Now, instead of the unassuming, bumbling pleasantries of a hapless smile, Luigi turned to a determined grimace. His forehead furrowed as his eyebrows followed suit - down and down they went until they captured the epitome of sinister…

They all expected him to come last in the latest race.

What they didn't expect was that these last 30 years in the shadows of an attention mongering starlet of a brother had left him a lot of time to become an expert in the use of the red and green shells of his former enemies that he had been harvesting over all these years.

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What they didn't expect was the smirk as he drove victoriously by their spun-out karts, left in the ditch after a perfectly-aimed shell shot.

In the races to come, they will learn to fear the forgotten man in the green hat, the super secret blue shell that he carries with him and the death stares accompanying his lethal precision.

Thanks to JM for some salt n' peppering in some ideas in editing.

Video used does not belong to me, and all credit goes to its creators. More videos can be found here.

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